McCabe & Mrs. Miller
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Movie Reviews of McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Movie Review: Anti-John Wayne
Summary: 4 Stars
This is one of those groundbreaking films that that put the whammy on a genre; in this case, the Western can never come back. Oaters traditionally are the realm of strong male characters righting wrong, loving their horses, and ignoring the school marm. Robert Altman, a political and cultural man of the 1960's Left simply says "horse feathers." The hero is a corrupt bawdyhouse owner. The school marm makes her living in a crude manner and normal everyday middle-class types don't really exist in the hardscrabble world of capitalism.
The town, near Vancouver, Canada sits in a mountains and wilderness. The film company built the town. That's real snow there folks and blizzards as our anti-hero Beatty shoots it out with the company men while his best "girl" Julie Christy hides out in an opium den, her brown eyes realistically glassy. John Wayne's, The Searchers was one of the best films ever made. McCabe & Mrs. Miller tries to undo all that.
Fascinating look at the underbelly of frontier life and a forerunner of the HBO series Deadwood, the West may not be a better place for it.
Movie Review: Not Much Plot, but Strong Documentary Feel
Summary: 4 Stars
Robert Altman's meandering, "we'll put it together in editing" directorial style lends an air of documentarian authenticity to this grim western, set in a snow-covered northwest mining town peopled by an aimless mob of mostly European immigrants. With no heroes to speak of, the film chronicles the downfall of an ambitious, if inept, entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) and his drug-addled prostitute partner (Julie Christie). Less about living than about survival, the film not surprisingly offers little in the way of plot, but it's nihilistic themes ring true with the moody acting of its leads and the dusty, sepia tones of its imagery. A particularly ironic moment of social commentary occurs when, after helping the town's whites save their church from a fire, an African-American couple just wanders away from the resulting celebration quietly, knowing they are no longer welcome. Leonard Cohen--less gravelly than usual but as hopeless as the guy with the guitar in "Operation Petticoat"--provides the soundtrack with a patina of sadness common to films of the early 70s.Movie Review: Interesting, but not Altman's strongest.
Summary: 3 Stars
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)
I've never much gotten along with Robert Altman's movies, though I've found that with Altman, as with Kubrick, the farther back I go in the catalog, the better the movie tends to be. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule (Altman was thinking what, exactly, when he agreed to helm the adaptation of Popeye?), but in general, it holds. And while I don't seem to have found McCabe and Mrs. Miller the be-all and end-all of film as some people have, it was certainly an enjoyable romp, if discomfiting at times.
McCabe (Warren Beatty, in by far the best performance I've seen from him) is an entrepreneur with a shady past who arrives in a logging town one winter looking to set up a brothel. He is soon joined by Constance Miller (Julie Christie), a madam with a lot more business sense than McCabe has. The two of them, working together, quickly grow their business into the premier economic attraction in tiny Presbyterian Church, Washington. Unfortunately, as attractions will do, it attracts. And some of the folks it attracts are the wrong kinds of folks, who would like to have that business for themselves. McCabe's flighty idealism and Miller's hard-headed pragmatism clash, even in the face of a common enemy.
This is not your momma's western; if John Wayne hated High Noon, I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall the first time he saw this! No hookers with a heart of gold here, no square-jawed heroes, none of the usual western clichés anywhere in sight. That by itself makes this an interesting movie, but Altman ups the ante with his directing ability, which was-- at least in the early seventies-- prodigious indeed (viz. M*A*S*H). This is a western that just kind of muddles through, for the most part, with a climax that's alternately amusing and horrifying (not necessarily because of the actions taking place, but because of the lack of every emotion we expect to see from both the good guys and the bad guys), some solid characters, and a few chuckles here and there. I liked it. ***
Movie Review: Warning: Poor Image Quality
Summary: 3 Stars
A five star film for story, cinematography and music. However, the image quality of the transfer is very problematic. There is a "grain" on many of the shots which is not film grain. Real film grain constantly changes instant by instant as the individual silver halide particles in each frams differs. By contrast, on this transfer, the "grain" is unchanging, static and persists between shots. It is almost as if the film was processed through a screen when striking the final master (which may be true, but I have never read about this post-production technique being used). Also, in the opening sequence, when the titles are running, there is a noticable dust mote (really, a hair-like curling line) on the left side of the frame, which finally is cleared out opf the gate after about 10 seconds or so). There is also noticable softness of the entire image on some shots, to be followed by other shots where the image is clear, which I find detracting.
Finally, the sound quality on the analogue tracks is very poor. I don't have a Dolby digital decoder, so I cannot comment on the digital tracks.
However, even with these caveats, I am so very happy to have this film (finally) in my collection. Watching it a day after Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (Criterion Collection DVD) is also very enlightening. Whether or not Altman was influenced by Kurosawa, there are elements of the story, the production values (e.g, rain in Seven Samurai, snow in McCabe to highten tension in the final showdown), and camera work which are common to both films.
Movie Review: I didn't get it.
Summary: 3 Stars
Perhaps I need to view "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" yet another time. I only watched it once and I really didn't "get" it. I had heard that it was a brilliant movie. Roger Ebert even called it a "perfect" movie. However, I was lost. I know Robert Altman is renowned for genre-deconstruction, but the story of an inept businessman (Warren Beatty) and his whip-smart prostitute cohort (Julie Christie) in the 19th century Pacific Northwest left me cold. I really couldn't get all that interested in these two, even after Beatty's futile battle with the evil businessmen from back East. I can understand exposing the myths of the Old West, but Altman does it in a rather depressing, tedious manner.
On a different note, the famously muddled sound really wasn't all that bad, and the cinematography I thought was quite good. The Leonard Cohen songs are half-decent, but still not good enough to overcome my indifference of his musical catalog.
All in all, I am willing to give "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" another try, but not for a while anyway.